Knowing ourselves is the key to being able to predict and understand our own future. To learn from past experiences, choices, and actions is to fully grasp the present. Coming to grips with the present is to be master of the future.

 

       “Know ThySelf” is a motto that takes us back to the philosophers of ancient Greece. Mystery Religions and cults of initiation throughout the ancient world, schools of mystical discipline, yoga and mental expansion have always been guardians of this sacred phrase. Know ThySelf. Of course that’s easy to say. But how do you go about it when there are  so many conflicts in our lives and different parts of our personalities? How do we know when we are really “being ourselves” and not merely being influenced by the things we read or see on television, or by the people around us? How can we differentiate the various parts of our character and still remain whole?

 

       There are many methods of classifying human being into types. Body shapes, muscular types, and genetic types are only a few. Psychology has its own ways of classifying human beings according to their behavior. Anthropology studies human evolution as the body-mind response to environment. Biology watches physical development and adaptations in body structure. These fields provide valuable information about human beings and the ways they survive, grow, and change in their search  for their place in eternity. Yet these branches of science have been separated and fragmented. Their contribution has been to provide theories and data, yes, but no lasting solutions to the human problems that have existed since the first two creatures realized they had two separate identities.

 

       It’s often difficult to classify yourself according to these different schemes. It’s not easy to be objective about yourself. Some things are hard to face; others are hard to see. The different perspectives afforded to us by studying the human organism from all these different disciplines may seem contradictory when they are all really trying to integrate humankind into the whole of the cosmic scheme.

 

       Astrology can help these disciplines unite to seek a broader and deeper approach to universal human issues. Astrology’s point of view if vast. It transcends racial, ethnic, genetic, environmental, and even historical criteria, yet somehow includes them all. Astrology embraces the totality of human experience, then sets about to examine the relationships that are created within that experience.

 

       We don’t simply say, “The planets cause this or that.” Rather than merely isolating cause or effect, astrology has unified the ideas of cause and effect. Concepts of past, present, and future merge and become, as we shall see a little latn, like stepping stones across the great stream of mind. Observations of people and the environment have developed the astrological principles of planetary “influence”, but it must be remembered that if there is actual influence, it is mutual. As the planets influence us, so we influence them, for we are forever joined to all past and future motion of the heavenly bodies. This is foundation of astrology as it has been built up over the centuries.

 

- exceprt from the book Total Horoscopes Series